My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays by Davy Rothbart

Description

Davy Rothbart is looking for love in all the wrong places. Constantly. He falls helplessly in love with pretty much every girl he meets—and rarely is the feeling reciprocated. Time after time, he hops in a car and tears across half of America with his heart on his sleeve. He’s continually coming up with outrageous schemes, which he always manages to pull off. Well, almost always. But even when things don’t work out, Rothbart finds meaning and humor in every moment. Whether it’s humiliating a scammer who takes money from aspiring writers or playing harmless (but side-splitting) goofs on his deaf mother, nothing and no one is off-limits.

But as much as Rothbart is a tragically lovable, irresistibly brokenhearted hero, it’s his prose that’s the star of the book. In the tradition of David Sedaris and Sloane Crosley but going places very much his own, his essays show how things that are seemingly so wrong can be so, so right.

Editorial Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2012: Following your heart can get you in a lot of trouble. This is true for no one more than Davy Rothbart, whose hilarious new essay collection is loosely built on the premise that he falls in love much too easily. But Rothbart's desire to impress his crushes is often just a starting place for a much wilder story. One involves rallying a group of strangers for the best Valentine's Day ever; in another, he finds a dead body in a swimming pool. (My favorite piece involves Rothbart's attempt to seek revenge on a scam artist by dumping urine on his head.) But none of these hilarious reflections would work if Rothbart didn't show such a clear sense of self-awareness. As a character, he's likable, shortsighted, and earnest; as a writer, he is a shrewd storyteller with a deep empathy for all the eccentric people he meets. Given his credentials–as a creator of Found Magazine and a contributor to This American Life–it's no surprise that Rothbart is so attuned to the world around him. Now if only his heart were as perceptive. —Kevin Nguyen